Transportation Blog

DART light rail delays worse than usual this morning

If you haven’t read my story this morning on DART, I wish you would. It takes a gloomy snap shot of the agency, which is faced some significant hurdles even as it completes one of the most ambitious light rail expansions in the country, and is doing so on time and within budget.

Customers gave it failing marks in the last three months of last year, as evidenced by the number of complaints (they went up), and the number of tickets sold (that went down.) The trains were also more likely to be late, or to be involved in accidents, than a year before.

The recession is finally hitting DART, too, and its finance chiefs told the board that tough decisions about the 20-year plan are ahead — even though, if you can believe it, the executives, including the president, would not tell board members how bad the picture looks.

And finally, delays on TxDOT’s part in relocating utilities are likely going to slow down Irving’s Orange Line, according to DART president Gary Thomas.

None of that is good, and neither is this: This morning, two daily riders sent me a note about longer than usual delays getting to work today. Rodger Jones, my colleague on this blog, writes to say:

Regular riders have gotten used to delays, but today’s were longer and more numerous than usual. We sat on the tracks at least once in Richardson for a long time, and another time in the tunnel beneath Cityplace. We had several long delays downtown. The driver blamed them on trains stopped ahead and one time on problems with traffic signals. I’d guess we were 10-15 minutes late. When that happens, riders typically break out their cell phones to let work know. I was sitting in front of one guy who sounded like he was a teacher at El Centro and had students waiting for him.

It has become clear that DART has a problem on its hands with the crowding of its rail lines downtown. The service levels have significantly dropped since the opening of the Green Line, and months of scrambling and “temporary fixes” have not yet solved those problems. It appears that they are usually minor problems, but fairly regularly turn into the kind of 10 or 15 minute headaches that Rodger writes about from this morning.

(This is just one guy’s opinion, but I get the need for caution, because the staff was still vetting some of the gloomy sales cast forecasts and other very complicated data. But when they tell the board chairman they can’t answer his question about how bad the numbers look for 30 days, isn’t that just the same as telling him he’s not bright enough, and the public who was listening, is not bright enough, to handle some of the still uncertain aspects of the numbers?

That kind of experience will make it harder for DART to address the rise in complaints reported in the quarterly update. That important, nearly 200 page, report, by the way, was only on the agenda for a 10 minute chat at yesterday’s DART board meetings. When it became time to chat about it, board members decided to skip it altogether to save time. They thought staff had already presented them with the information when it discussed the financial picture. “I don’t want to be depressed twice,” one member said. But they were wrong, and didn’t know that the report dealt with serious ridership declines, and worsening performance results across a wide range of measures. The staff didn’t correct them, and the item wasn’t discussed.

About the morning delays, staff did present a plan — largely tied to better coordination with traffic signals — yesterday it says will work to smooth out those problems, and to make room for the new cars that will come on line once the Green Line opens in full in December.

But the Orange line, due to open in 2011, will bring more trains downtown and how to fix that without a second downtown rail line — already pushed to 2016 and thanks to the new sales tax figures perhaps delayed even further — is anybody’s guess.

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Transportation writer Brandon Formby and editorial writer Rodger Jones cover the subject from tollways to traffic, roads to rail. They invite tips and feedback from decision-makers and commuters alike.